What some teachers have to deal with .....

Just checking out a school website / Dfee information for DH.I have never seen this on the web page of a Primary school before

AttendanceThe class with the best attendance each week will be awarded £2.50 to put towards enrichment activities at the end of the year. We colour band our attendanceGold = 95%-100%Green = 90% - 95%Amber = 80-90%Red = Below 80%Please arrive on time for school. Children need to be in the line at 8:55am. School starts at 9:00am. School finishes at 3:15pmPlease be on time to collect your child.When your child has a medical or dental appointment, it is important that you bring the appointment card to the School Office to confirm the absence from school

It makes me realise how cushy even the rougher schools round here are!

This is not unusual and there is nothing wrong with a bit of peer pressure/ pester power on parents re attendance.Of course there are always going to be parents who find it hard to comply/ or simply won't and hopefully a school would have policies to deal with them.Also care must be taken re true illness ie not punitive towards ill health.

TalkinPeace, I'm afraid one of the primary schools "round here" includes my dd, which drives their attendance down pretty drastically. No class with her in it is going to get any gold awards for attendance unless the other pupils are freakishly healthy. And because the school has a particularly good reputation for pastoral care, it does rather attract families with health problems. Or, as you might prefer to term it, feral families.

My DCs school has a lot of children with special needs and health issues (leukaemia, heart issues etc. and thats just the ones I know). It doesn't have to resort to this kind of bribing, in fact the HT said his biggest issue was parents taking their kids out of school for skiing. It i a big school which helps though.I have never had to produce evidence of medical appointments either.

I work with a school on the "poorer" side of town, and they don't have particular issues with this, despite having a special unit for certain disabilities. They do have a generally good relationship with parents though. (And the hospital for general appointments is very close, so appointments should mean just 1/2 a day lost).

So I'm really not sure why you attacked the OP, except for her vaguely smug posting.

One of my year 11 classes last year had an overall attendance of just over 80%. It was a big problem. In schools where attendance is poor, it is not generally long term sickness that is the issue. The number of children with serious health issues is usually small enough not to excessively influence a large group average. There are many, many students who habitually miss days here and there, and their results suffer because of it. The OFSTED insistence that all schools meet a floor Target of 95% is what leads to policies that affect all families, including those of sick children. But while they should not be harassed over attendance, the unfairness if a blanket policy shouldn't hide the fact that many children are damaging their education by staying away from school, and that their parents are sometimes complicit in that.

TheFallenMadonna - with your year 11 pupil either: they were a school refuser or had a very dis-functional home life. In both cases the right kind of intervention earlier might have helped; but by year 11 its very late. However around here there are mentoring schemes that do try to help those in danger of becoming NEETs. I don't think bribing a form class would help one iota.

Also do you have children of 15/16 yet? Because it is very hard to get someone much bigger and stronger than you out of bed, let alone to school, I can tell you.

I suppose my reason for worrying is that dd has suffered badly in the past from constant adverse comments about how she was letting the school down through her chronic health problems and consequent low attendance.

She is now at a different school but is still dealing with anxiety issues which have resulted in school refusal, self harming and one attempt at suicide. When she has been ill, she feels so bad about herself that she feels she can't go in and face people.

Proof of every single absence can also become a heavy financial burden on a family with chronic health problems. I paid £20 this morning for a letter from the GP to the school re dd's recent kidney infection. If you have a child who is absent frequently, that quickly adds up.

Ds started at a primary school in an area with quite a few Traveller families. Many of these children, although in settled housing, attended school sporadically/turned up late. Their parents just didn't seem to place that much emphasis on the whole school thing. Unfortunately, as in much of life, petty bureaucrats (aka school secretaries) find picking on the kid with recurrent tonsillitis is easier than tackling endemic absence and difficult parents.

I saw somewhere or other there was a scheme in, I think, New Jersey where children (older children, though) were given monetary incentives to regularly attend school and get good grades. It proved to be very successful.

if you are on the register as a traveller you are permitted absences, though - so they can hardly chase up, can they? a friend of mine goes all round S America on business with her dc, and they probably learn more out of school than in it tbh

Not a student. A class of 29 with an average attendance of 81%. And yes, intervention should start early, of course. I mention the year 11s as they are the ones doing exams. And I am accountable for their results whether they are in my lessons or not.

I'm sure it is very difficult to get a 15yo out of bed. Not sure I could do it with my year 7 DS. But, like intervention, parents have early influence.

And my students are most certainly not travelling around South America either! They are playing computer games mostly.